Superduperswingmen (Part 3: 1950-1970)

This series tips the THT cap in honor of the Swingman, the pitcher who pivots from the starting rotation to the bullpen and back. This pitching role eschews the comfort zone of specialization, yet emerges as something of a specialist itself, simply because not every pitcher has the flexibility demanded by this double-duty assignment. The Swingman is too often an unsung hero, making a greater contribution to team success than his individual stats might suggest, due to his capacity to handle tasks that would otherwise require two or more pitchers to fulfill.

The term Swingman traditionally has been applied to any pitcher who frequently works as both a starter and a reliever, but here we’re recognizing the most prolific of these practitioners. We define a Superswingman as:

{exp:list_maker}A pitcher who appears in 40 or more games in a season
Among those 40 games, at least 15 must be starts and at least 15 must be relief appearances {/exp:list_maker}A pitcher who presents more than one such season in his career earns the exalted title of Superduperswingman.

Our first two chapters have profiled the Superduperswingmen of 1900-1930 and 1930-1950. This time we’ll be focusing on the period in which specialized bullpen roles came into full fruition, and the set starting rotation increasingly became the norm, both factors that would to reduce the prevalence of Swingman deployment—yet as we’ll see, the role not only persisted, but was performed by several highly successful pitchers.

One of the harder throwers in the league, and possessor of a wicked curve as well, through the 1950s Klippstein was given chance after chance by the Cubs and then the Reds to step forward as a front-line starter. But unable to find the strike zone consistently, Klippstein couldn’t translate stuff into effectiveness, and through this period his career was largely an exercise in frustration.

In his 30s, Klippstein would be converted to a full-time reliever, and while his success remained up-and-down—in the modern parlance, “location” would forever be a challenge for him—Klippstein would deliver a few first-rate seasons in that role. Given that, it might seem that in his years as a swingman Klippstein might have been distinctly more effective in his relief assignments than as a starter, but that really wasn’t the case. In two of the three seasons we see here, Klippstein had a better ERA as a starter than as a reliever, and in 1957 his relief ERA was a ghastly 6.12 in 43 innings.

This little guy, on the other hand, didn’t throw hard at all. He always had fine control, but his repertoire was a smoke-and-mirrors array of herky-jerky head fakes and taking something off the change-up and then taking something more off it. As such, it isn’t surprising that it took quite a while for Miller to master his artful technique and move beyond novelty-act journeyman status and emerge as a star. The two seasons we see here provide an aptly vivid contrast between the struggling early-career Miller and the later version that drove hitters nuts.

The turning point for Miller was precisely the 1958 season below, in which he suddenly burst out of mediocrity to lead the league in ERA. In his 21 relief appearances in 1958, Miller delivered an ERA of, get this, 0.81 in 44.1 innings. Is it any surprise that he quickly thereafter became a relief specialist, and one of the best in the game?

Stu Miller had the best change-up ever. He held it just like a fastball, and right at the last second he was able to break his wrist backwards so he had that real good fastball arm motion, and the ball had a fastball spin, but it never got there. They’d sit around waiting for the change-up, but it took so long to get there that they went on and swung anyway.

Miller’s exceptional skill at changing speeds and keeping hitters off-balance produced a consistently healthy strikeout rate, despite high-end velocity that was better measured by an hourglass than a radar gun. In every regard, the modern pitcher whose style Miller clearly compares with is Trevor Hoffman.

One of the longest and most intriguing careers in the history of professional baseball contained several distinct phases.

Before he reached the big leagues Fowler spent a full decade toiling in the minors, where he won 120 games. Finally arriving in the majors as a fully formed veteran, Fowler spent several seasons providing solid work as the durable, versatile Swingman we see below.

But at the age of 34, in 1957, he encountered a bad year, and as he bounced around from majors to minors over the next few seasons it appeared that the end of the line was very near. But then, in May of 1961, the first-year expansion Angels took a chance on him, and the 38-year-old Fowler was reborn as a dependable major league reliever. His exploits with that famously rambunctious crew in Los Angeles in the early 1960s (let’s just say they were baseball’s version of the Rat Pack) are delightfully chronicled in Danny Peary’s oral history, We Played the Game.

As an active pitcher, Fowler in 1964 also was named pitching coach by Angels manager Bill Rigney. But that didn’t last long; he was let go by the Angels in May of that season. Not yet ready to retire, Fowler signed with the Denver Bears of the Pacific Coast League. Deep into his 40s, Fowler spent several more years as an effective Triple-A relief pitcher.

In mid-1968, Billy Martin took over as the Denver manager, and he and Fowler became close friends. Martin embraced Fowler as an ideal pitching coach (and drinking buddy), and in that capacity Fowler would follow Martin for the next couple of decades: with the Twins in 1969, the Tigers in 1971-73, the Rangers in 1973-75, the Yankees in 1977-79, the Athletics in 1980-82 and the Yankees again in 1983 and 1988. In his nearly half-century in baseball, Fowler never missed a party, yet unlike Martin he would make it to the ripe old age of 84.

Lawrence was not your average tobacco-chewing 1950s baseball player. He spent most of his spare time reading: his favorites included Hemingway …

He also saw both sides of baseball’s effort to integrate. “It was a two-way street,” he said. “It was a totally new experience for the white players too.” As a veteran, he discouraged black teammates from bunching together in locker rooms. “If we keep huddled up, we’re not going to learn anything, and the people around us aren’t going to learn anything.”

Lawrence railed against the discrimination he endured, especially during spring training in Florida. “We can go to the dog races, if we sit in a special section set aside for us,” he said. “The only distinction they don’t make is the color of our money …. a man would have to be out of his mind to bring a wife and children down here and expose them to this sort of treatment.”

Lawrence emerged as the ace of the Cincinnati staff in 1956-57, and as we see, manager Birdie Tebbetts deployed him in the old-fashioned manner of aces in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s: taking a regular turn as a starter, but also coming out of the bullpen in high-leverage situations.

As a rookie in 1954, Stone had made the All-Star team. But as we see, things steadily unraveled after that, as Stone’s control evaporated.

Struggling or not, southpaws with intriguing stuff will keep getting chances, and Stone would be given a try by several organizations. But he never again established himself as a consistently effective major leaguer.

Relief aces in the 1950s were rarely young pitchers. Instead the standard fireman was a wily, grizzled veteran extending his career with a few years as a bullpen specialist.

Cleveland manager Al Lopez bucked that trend in 1954. That season Lopez featured not one but two rookies as ace relievers, and both performed sensationally as the Indians breezed to their phenomenal 111-43 record.

Ideally every team in the majors should have at least two excellent relief pitchers—one left-handed and one right-handed. And ideally each of us should be handsome, charming, intelligent, and rich.

Of course in the real world none of these things is ever going to come to pass, although for three brief years in the early fifties the Cleveland Indians had as close to the perfect relief tandem as any team is likely to come up with. Ray Narleski was the right-hander of the pair and Don Mossi was the left-hander; and the efficiency of their work in the Indian bullpen was only overshadowed by their almost total lack of color and personality out of it.

They always reminded me of two small-town undertakers who, having found the world at large a particularly cold and hardhearted place to do business in, have banded together in a desperate and distrustful partnership for the purposes of mutual self-preservation. Narleski with his sly little-boy grin and the darting, fishy eyes of the small-time criminal handles the customer relations, and Mossi with his loving-cup ears and the dark hulking presence of the newly dead or resurrected does all the dirty work.

Over the years the Indians gave both Narleski and Mossi an increasing proportion of starting assignments along with their bullpen work, and both continued to perform successfully.

Following the 1958 season, Cleveland GM Frank Lane traded the pair to Detroit (in exchange for, interestingly enough, Billy Martin). But there the small-town undertakers would part ways: Narleski immediately imploded, his career skidding to a halt, while Mossi continued to pitch well as both a starter and a reliever into the mid-1960s.

He was never a superstar—well, maybe he was in 1964, winning 24 games in 298 innings and finishing second in the major-league-wide Cy Young Award vote—but Jackson was among the most consistently dependable and durable pitchers in baseball for a long time.

Before he became a full-time starter, the Cardinals deployed Jackson extensively in the bullpen. In 1956 he was almost exclusively a reliever, and in the two seasons below they continued to call on him in relief as well as in the starting role. Jackson’s combined record as a reliever in 1957-58: 45 games, 96 innings, 9-7 with nine saves and a 2.54 ERA.

Jackson still was pitching as well as ever when he opted to retire from baseball at the age of 37. Handsome, articulate and popular, he operated an insurance company and would become executive director of the Idaho Republican Party in 1972. He eventually served eight years in the Idaho state legislature, and in 1978 Jackson made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination for governor. He died of cancer at the age of 59.

Signed as a bonus baby out of Clemson University, O’Dell never spent a day in the minor leagues. He always was liberally deployed as both a starter and a reliever, and while he thrived in both roles, in relief O’Dell tended to be especially effective. His aggregate record in 69 games and 140 innings out of the bullpen from 1957 through 1960 was a won-lost record of just 5-9, but with 15 saves and an ERA of 2.45.

Hobbie was part of a group of highly impressive young pitchers the Cubs brought to the majors in the late ’50s/early ’60s, that included Moe Drabowsky, Dick Drott, Bob Anderson and Dick Ellsworth. But for all their promise, this quintet would achieve a mixed bag of major league success.

In Hobbie’s case at least, the fizzle might be traced to the enormous workload the Cubs saddled him with as a youngster. Following the workhorse swingman 1958 season we see below, in 1959 and ’60 Hobbie would make 69 starts and 23 relief appearances, totaling 493 innings and allowing 679 baserunners at ages 23-24.

A knockabout control-artist journeyman, Shaw was bedeviled by inconsistency. But when he was good, he could be outstanding, as in the seasons we see below. As a reliever in these two years, Shaw worked 53 games and 99 innings, and went 6-5 with 16 saves and a 1.64 ERA.

By the late 1950s, the concept of drawing a clear line through the pitching staff, with full-time starters working in regular rotation on one side, and full-time relievers on the other, was beginning to take hold in the majors. But it was by no means universal.

Bill Rigney’s handling of the Giants’ staff in 1958-59 was particularly old-school in this regard. In ’58, Rigney’s top three starters Johnny Antonelli, Ruben Gomez and McCormick combined for 92 starts, but they also made 33 relief appearances and had five saves. And in 1959, Antonelli, McCormick, Sam Jones and Jack Sanford made 135 starts and 38 relief appearances, finished 24 games and had 10 saves.

McCormick was an exceptionally young pitcher to be ridden this hard, and in the early 1960s, just as he was on the verge of breaking out as a big star, he would be felled by a sore arm. But McCormick battled his way through the arm trouble, resurfacing with the Senators as a screwball specialist and demonstrating outstanding control. In 32 innings as a reliever in 1965, he allowed just 18 hits and seven walks, striking out 30 and flashing an ERA of 1.41.

McCormick would return to the Giants and cap off the comeback with a Cy Young Award-winning season in 1967.

A pleasant surprise for the White Sox in 1960, the sinkerballing Baumann led the league in ERA. But things went the other way for him in a hurry; the next season his home run rate doubled and his BABIP leapt from .261 to .329.

A big, strong southpaw who always racked up impressive strikeout rates, Stigman never was able to quite turn the corner into sustained major league effectiveness. In the Georgia State League in 1956, Stigman had gone 17-9 with a 1.44 ERA and 263 strikeouts in 213 innings.

Kind of in the same boat as his teammate Stigman, this hard-throwing right hander out of USC continually was expected to step forward as a star. The Indians had surrendered Herb Score to get him in trade, and the Angels then would offer up Leon Wagner, but Latman never would make it out of the journeyman ranks.

Yet another in the category of guys with an impressive fastball but able to find only intermittent success in the majors. Hamilton’s struggles with control were monumental; in one season in the minors, he struck out 225 but walked 156 in 190 innings. It was Hamilton’s great misfortune to be the pitcher whose errant fastball struck down Tony Conigliaro in 1967.

A sidearmer with a sinking fastball and a sweeping curve, Chance was among the better pitchers in baseball through the mid-1960s. It was Chance, in fact, who beat out Larry Jackson for the MLB-wide Cy Young Award in 1964.

Angels manager Rigney continued his practice of bringing his starters out of the bullpen in between starts; he would be one of the last managers to employ this practice liberally. In 1963-64, Rigney deployed Chance in essentially the same manner as such aces as Lefty Grove, Carl Hubbell and Dizzy Dean in the 1930s: Chance made 70 starts in those two seasons, but also 21 relief appearances in which he was 4-2 with 7 saves and a 1.80 ERA.

The Giants had signed the teenaged Perry in 1958 to a lavish bonus; only a relaxation of the bonus baby rules allowed them to farm him out. But Perry’s progress hadn’t been as dramatic as hoped. At the conclusion of the 1963 season he was 25 years old and had been in pro ball for six years, but had only delivered 119 major league innings with a 4-7 record and a 4.46 ERA. Perry’s brother Jim, just two years older but long established as a solid major leaguer, once made the less-than-brotherly crack that “Gaylord got the money, but I got the talent.”

As of Memorial Day in 1964, things still weren’t looking up for Gaylord. He’d made just one start on the season, had appeared in only eight games overall, and had a 4.76 ERA in 17 innings. The second game of the holiday doubleheader went into deep extra innings, and with their bullpen depleted the Giants turned to Perry in the bottom of the 13th. He notched a scoreless inning, then another. Then another and another as the Giants and Mets traded goose eggs long into the night.

Perry ended up delivering 10 innings of shutout relief, striking out nine, and earned the win as the Giants finally broke the tie in the 23rd inning. Legend has it that Perry, feeling he had nothing to lose, in this game tried out a new pitch he’d been taught by his cagey veteran teammate Bob Shaw, whom we met above: the greaseball.

Whether that’s the case or not, the game was a turning point for Perry. He would proceed to deliver the highly impressive Superswingman season we see below. The following year, deployed in the same manner, he’d struggle a bit, but in the season following that Perry would earn a spot in the regular starting rotation and break through as a star.

Into the mid-1960s, it still wasn’t uncommon for teams to eschew a hard rotation; here we see the Giants deploying teammates Perry and Herbel in old-fashioned ad-lib starter-reliever fashion.

Herbel was an unremarkable journeyman as a pitcher. But he rapidly gained great renown as one of the least capable hitters in major league history. In his rookie season of 1964 Herbel went a cool 0-for-47 at the plate, with 30 strikeouts. He would finally get his first hit (an RBI single) in May of 1965 after 55 hitless major league at-bats. For his career Herbel would go 6-for-206 (an .029 average) with three runs batted in, eight total bases, eight walks, and 125 strikeouts. His career OPS+ was -70.

Few performers have ever experienced Tiant’s high highs and low lows. Forget a roller-coaster ride; Tiant’s career arc resembled the manic endeavors of a drunk stunt pilot with a sticky throttle.

In the minors, Tiant would endure a harrowing season in which he went 5-19 with a 5.92 ERA, but a few years later he was flying at 15-1 with a 2.04 ERA in Triple-A, earning a midseason call-up to the majors. Tiant would find clear blue skies in the big leagues, going 19-7 with a 3.00 ERA in his first 12 months, but then nosedived into a 2-8, 4.05 slump.

He arrested the sudden descent with the outstanding 1966 Superswingman performance we see below, which would allow Tiant to regain full-time starter status and attain major stardom. But after soaring success, Tiant would stall out and nearly crash and burn, plummeting to a 9-20 record in one season and 1-7 in another, finding himself released and back in the minors. But he re-established his bearings with the scintillating 1972 Superswingman effort, and once he made it back to the top a second time, Tiant was finally able to stabilize and cruise to 229 victories.

Another guy who resurrected his career from dead-arm, back-to-the-minors oblivion, the 6-foot-5, 230-pound Williams turned in back-to-back strong-as-an-ox whatever-it-takes seasons for the Indians. The Twins then acquired him in a trade (along with, incidentally, Tiant), and deployed him as a relief specialist, a role in which Williams in 1970 would produce a glittering 10-1, 15-save, 191 ERA+ performance in 68 games and 113 innings.

Deployed by the A’s in nearly the exact same manner five seasons apart, Segui achieved dramatically different results. The two seasons vividly symbolize the 20-something Segui, with impressive stuff but lacking the finer points of consistent command, versus the 30-something Segui, who transformed himself from “thrower” into “pitcher” and was efficiently effective in both bullpen and spot starting assignments into the mid-1970s.

Segui led the league in ERA as a Superswingman in 1970, a feat achieved by three others on this list: Stu Miller (1958), Frank Baumann (1960) and Luis Tiant (1972).

Charlie Finley signed Krausse upon his high school graduation in 1961, and immediately assigned him to the big club. Krausse responded with a complete-game three-hit shutout in his first game, but reality quickly set in, as unsurprisingly Krausse proved to be not ready for the majors.

He was sent to the minors, and following several years of development would make it back. He’d never be especially good, but Krausse was good enough to deliver several useful seasons as an innings-eating Swingman. The pointlessness of bringing up a high-schooler too soon wouldn’t faze Finley, though; he’d essentially repeat the same stunt with Mike Morgan in the late 1970s.